RE: Reflections on the Benefits and Growing Pains of Project Curie, Steem Guild, and Other Curation Projects on Steemit
the decisions are actually made from the bottom up since our field curators and proxy voters are working together to call the shots
Somewhat. They are doing so according to rules and guidelines that are entirely top down. Someone decided that spreading the wealth and creating a lot of $10-$30 posts (along with one daily $800) post is a good idea. It may be, or it may not be.
There do need to be ways to for stakeholders to delegate, but there are many different ways to skin that cat, and it doesn't necessarily require any particular model of delegation such as a guild. For example, some of my vote power is currently delegated to a specific individual I have picked who is an effective curator and is very self-directed and self-managing, this minimizing my time investment, while resulting in competely decentralized curation that I personally find to be effective.
The answer on how this really should work is a lot less clear to me now than it was when I started the Teamsmooth Curators guild. I think we need more experimentation and in that vein things like Curie are a good thing, but let's take care that they don't turn into a self-perpetuating bureaucracy supported by a daily $500+ reward fund tax (which as @dennygalindo points out is equivalent to a daily $10K+ reward during the price peak).
The daily rewards are an issue to me as well, and it was one reason I wrote this post. I see this as a temporary band-aid and I think the formalized voting guilds will allow for better models, but for the meantime, the work these projects are doing is too important not to support. I'm definitely in agreement with you that we should continue experimenting (and listening and being open to other ideas). There is no top-down decision-making or magic # to the $30 rewards; the team members have come up with that rewards range as a group, but we are not wedded to it at all. In fact, we have been adjusting these at various points and are quite open to community feedback about what works best. If a better model were to emerge, I can't tell you how happy I would be to stand aside. :)
Hi Donkeypong.
About the daily post you made with curie. why not just post it on a external site or use the 0% reward option?
That daily post could fund another 25 authors, instead of the curie account.
His point is that the rewards from that post are needed to pay the costs of operating Curie in its present form. Otherwise he could just post an update and summary less frequently (say weekly) as another option.
Tough decisions may need to be made though (I think noted in the post). The reward pool is shrinking and that is a significant slice being drained from it.
Maybe top-down is not exactly the right way to describe it, but the point is that it is institutionalized and such institutions must have a degree of inertia to sanely function as an organization. Curie has a mission statement (an informal one at least). That's not to say it can't evolve, but people join knowing that mission (and likely supporting it or they wouldn't join), so it becomes self-reinforcing.
Individual voters who haven't institutionalized their decision making can and do more easily shift direction on a whim, as quickly as today's hottest pop star can be tomorrow's has-been. Steemsports is a great example of something that likely wouldn't have been popular or fit the mold of what voters were looking for a few month ago, but it successful now.
I started a curation guild to discover unrecognized posts and authors (and still have an individual dedicated curator doing that for me) but now I'm recognizing more value in people having at least the possibility of a critical mass of success and earnings in some (not all) cases that call for more focused voting. In some ways the smaller reward pool makes this even stronger as the amounts of very-widely-distributed rewards become increasingly meaningless (better to give at least meaningful rewards to a few, I think). So the pendulum swings on these things.
sorry need to reply to another reply the 6 answer reply limit is so bad ;)..
Yes I read that donkey said they are thinking of getting rid of the finders fees for authors. so under this assumption they could do it externally or post a weekly update.
do you know what happens if one uses the decline payout option? will the reward pool still shrink?
The reward pool does not shrink if the post is not paid out. The rewards get allocated to other posts instead.
in this case if curie got rid of finders fee's they could do their daily update using their decline option.
I like the post as I can see which posts they voted and I can't track manually all their votes.
I trust donkeypong and all others that they will find a way to optimize curie in the future.